STD Scare Tactics

When I was in high school, sex-ed was an elective class which, unfortunately, didn't cover the things students most wanted to know about, like interesting sex positions. It did, however, cover the other basics, like hygiene, what contraceptives and prophylactics were, and how pregnancy occurred. We dutifully sat through the class, wrote down our suggestions for more interesting material on the evaluation forms, and told other students that the class was easy, but dull.

When I joined the military, sex-ed was a grisly slide-show shown to GIs who had been assigned to posts outside the US. The slides mainly consisted of close-up photos of bizarre, stomach-churning lesions and growths on people's genitals. This, of course, prompted some ewws and ughs during the slides and a fair amount of snickering after the lights came up. Even our lecturers had a tough time keeping a straight face, and, when pressed, admitted that the photos were of people who had refused to take antibiotics for decades. Nevertheless, we were told that it was dangerous to have sex with foreigners. Apparently, we were supposed to believe that no one besides us had ever heard of penicillin.

Over the last half-dozen years, the American public school system has decided to move from the dull, but useful, syllabus I saw in high school, towards the frightening, and deceptive, curriculum of the US military. According to the Washington Post, most sex-ed classes are now teaching students that AIDS is transmitted through perspiration, chlamydia induces cardiac arrest, and feeling someone's genitals causes pregnancy. It looks like some schools are even telling students that STDs are divine punishment for out-of-wedlock sexual activity. I haven't heard whether they're using the gross-out slide-shows in schools yet, but a Senator has been showing one to college interns at Capital Hill for years. I guess it replaced the outdated honesty-in-government lecture.

It's not tough to discover that, of the one or two dozen STDs which exist, all but a few are either easily prevented with vaccines or treated with a few days of antibiotics. Of the few that aren't treatable, only one is likely to develop into anything dangerous. Don't, however, trust your school system, or the government's public service announcements, to mention this to you. They won't. You can be sure that they'll talk about AIDS, though, because, despite the remote odds most Westerners have of catching it, it's the centerpiece of America's abstinence-only campaign.

So, how likely are you to catch AIDS? According to reports in the Journal of the American Medical Association and The New England Journal of Medicine, if you live in the West, and you haven't hooked-up with a homosexual male, intravenous drug user, or a hemophiliac, the chance of picking up AIDS is roughly one in a million. With a condom, it's one in tens of millions. For comparison, the odds of being struck by lightning whenever it rains are one in several hundred thousand. This isn't to say that it's clever to have hundreds of different sex partners a year, but the actual risks don't really call for an abstinence-only approach, do they?

So, what's going on? Why would people exaggerate the risks of sex so ludicrously if the STDs which aren't treatable are either a nuisance or extremely rare? No one tells people not to shake hands or talk to each other because they might pick up one of the other thousands of bacterial or viral diseases floating around, do they?

Well, one argument is the, "Aren't there too many people in the world as it is, and do you really want teenagers getting pregnant?" line of thinking. Yes, they're right, but populations have been shrinking in the West, mostly because someone figured out that it might be a good idea to mention that contraceptives work, and people don't have to worry about sex resulting in pregnancy. If these people were really concerned about overpopulation and young parents, they could just tell them about contraceptives. It's been astonishingly effective.

Another argument is the, "We know people won't tell the doctor if they catch something, because we've spent so much time trying to make them ashamed of sex that they'll be afraid to and end up spreading the infection," line of thinking. Okay, VD isn't very healthy and can spread, when left untreated, but if these people really cared about that, wouldn't it make more sense for them to stop embarrassing people and encourage them to talk to a doctor about it the same way they do for any other infection?

The last argument is the, "But my religious denomination told me it was wrong to have sex out of wedlock, so no one else should either," line of thinking. Alright, but ethically, the only thing wrong with sexual activity is when someone's lying, coercing, abusing, or trying to take money from people with it. And, if someone's religion tells them not to have sex outside of marriage, then perhaps they shouldn't, but they also shouldn't assume everyone else belongs to their religion or that even those people who do are strict adherents to it. Deception is probably prohibited by their religion also, so why would they think it's okay to lie about the situation?

Wouldn't it be nice if our leaders and educators didn't spend so much time creating paranoia and hysteria about sex and were, instead, honest and informative about it? I'd bet we'd have a lot fewer problems with VD and unwanted pregnancy if they were.